Over the past couple of years, I have heard some consistent themes for objecting to Cloud services that are focused on a perception of the loss of control* of data that is somehow inherent in placing a business service into (particularly) Software as a Service. As a result, most SaaS providers have recognised that a clear exit strategy for potential customers, and portability of data, is vital to allow new customers to come on board. This, it strikes me, has resulted in two paradoxes…
The first paradox is that exit strategies for on premise software has never been a particularly strong focus for vendors, and yet there seems to be a view that data locked away in a proprietary data schema underneath a proprietary business application is in some way under the customer’s control if it sits on servers on site but isn’t if it’s in the Cloud.
The second paradox, however, is more fundamental: if you are going to get business value from a service, then you’ve got to rely on it, and have to give up some sort of control somewhere along the line. If you hamper yourself through not believing it will work (thus designing to fail), you can be pretty sure that failure will be the eventual outcome. Maybe this is a reflection on what still sometimes can seem like an immature IT market (after over half a decade of existence!).
If you are going to rely on a service partner, you’ve got to accept that you are relying on them. I heard the head of the company Bunzl speak on Evan Davies’ “The Bottom Line” show on Radio 4 a couple of weeks ago. I’d seen Bunzl’s trucks on the motorways, and there branding kind of indicated that they were in the Oil and Gas business to me. Turns out they make paper and plastic products for (mostly) the food industry – and have a number of major high-street brands who would basically break if they didn’t (literally) deliver. Imagine a coffee shop without cups – you get the idea.
There is a level of trust and mutual reliance that exists in that sort of service provider industry that we are only just starting to see emerge in the IT industry as it starts to make steps from being product-led to service-led.
* as an aside, a colleague was recently speaking with some IT folk from the finance sector, and their primary concern about Cloud appeared to be the fear that too much control over the configuration of a Cloud service in the hands of the Enterprise customer could result in things being done that would expose them to risk as a result of doing daft things. The view seemed to be that if you cock things up on a private LAN/WAN, at least your exposure is kept within the boundaries of the organisation…
mmitII 